About

LIPSYNC LAWYER takes a diff’rent ‘angle’ on the law — sometimes an uncensored look too.

The blog is primarily geared on the Common Law world, but the Civil Code countries are not off the hook. Indeed, anything that’s legally related will be hanged, drawn and quartered here.

Lipsync Lawyer is an offshoot project of The Naked Listener’s Weblog, one of the world’s earliest blogs from 1995/96 originally hosted at the now-defunct ibm.net. For now, the initial aim is to give an independent or separate space for all the law-related posts on TNL. In short, it’s the blogging version of the song “I Want to Break Free” by Queen (1984).

Vital statistics

Lipsync Lawyer was born on Monday 19 December 2016 at 2.30 pm GMT — coincidentally, the National Hard Candy Day in the USA. It went ‘live’ on Christmas Eve at precisely 3.10 am GMT.

The blog’s official timezone is UTC. It normally updates every Tuesday at 8pm UTC, though no guarantees are made. It’s because that’s the proverbial blogging meme date.

The official blog language is English. There may be bits in other languages, but their appearance (and accuracy) isn’t guaranteed either.

The initial layout theme is the free Twenty Sixteen, but that’s bound to change when the inestimable WordPress.com graciously and generously introduces a new default theme for year 2017.

Commenting

Comments are always welcomed on all posts, but comments close after 14 days in a bid to stop the corrections, the trolls, and my secret mistresses from haranguing me for money.

Disclaimer

By the way, everything (literally everything) in this blog isn’t actual legal advice or legal information. You can’t be serious thinking it could ever be that. This is the Internet — get real and stop being incompetent. You can’t always rely on a lawyer, much less something on the Internet. C’mon, my old son.

The excuse for this caper

HERE’S the thing:— I’ve had a hard time trying to explain the whys and hows of this project without turning it into a total bitch session.

Ever since leaving law school — indeed, any kind of school, thankyouverymuch — I’ve been toying with the idea of doing a law blog (a “blawg”). Seeing that so many others have done it already, I just went back to my usual wine, women and song.

Around April 2014, the idea of blogging about law and legal issues of everyday life cropped up again. Just to show some goddamned initiative and keep the Ark sailing, the blog name Lipsync Lawyer had already been decided upon even then.

Now that this caper is a fait accompli, it boils down to a single reason for doing it:—

The stuff of law and law books is failing its mission. It’s unreadable even to sophisticated minds.

There are loads of serious, serious-sounding and srsly serious law sites and blawgs on the Internet. There are loads of legal works, textbooks, worshipful worksheets, practice directions, etc, published every year in the Outernet (a.k.a. Real Life).

Trouble is, lots of us have massive trouble just physically eyeballing this finely crafted crap — never mind understanding it.

Leaving aside the purely legal terminology, the presentation and language of statutes and cases don’t relate to anything in life even for the legal eagles. Many of us therefore come away with a deficient — and warped — picture of the law.

Or ask your favourite lawyer for an alternative opinion.

Why the name

TO HELL WITH THE DETAILS! Nothing sells like a good name.

“ ‘The Naked Listener’ was brilliant, eye-catching to say the least. To come up with another stream of writeups and to have a name that exceeds the ‘sound-power’ of ‘The Naked Listener’ is quite challenging, LOL.” — (hat tip to E.C., 13 Apr 2014, 9.33 pm)

A bad name is an uphill struggle — no matter how good everything else might be. Ask any seasoned businessman or a Ponzi scheme artist for proof of concept.

Important to do this because…

DECADES of this legal stuff, yet learners can’t wrap their heads around it. Legal working stiffs are jaded by it. Only the enforcement lackeys have the common sense to ignore it — because it’s unreadable.

Time for a rethink, eh?

Or it’s back to the amphetamines and barbiturates washed down with piss and phlegm just to plough through this weasel puke called ‘Law.’

The subject of Law — like History — is bound to get harder to learn year after year as events and cases keep piling up. The ashcan of unreadability is replete with the fag-ash butts of statutes and cases that form the very foundations of law and nationhood of any country.

Even ironing out the differences between jurisdictions and countries, a law student anywhere has to learn 5,000 cases per law degree — split into roughly 300 cases per module (area of law). The LL.B. (Hons) or J.D. degree of any jurisdiction typically lasts three or four years and has 12 to 15 modules.

All it takes is a simple recasting of the presentation.

I have literally witnessed students and practitioners alike waste a whole night (six hours at least) over a single paragraph. What might be a simple enough scenario (but for being worded in a difficult way) could be transformed from hours into literally MINUTES of reading and comprehension time.

Gives different (but not alternative) conceptual presentation of each case.

No dilution of facts or factualness of each case, regardless of above (or the humour).

No set posting frequency (once a week or every two weeks?).

Aimed at everybody, not just the lying legal bastards.

Depending on your definition of ‘humour,’ there’s something for everyone.

I want the blog to have a diff’rent take without going all-pants-down humorous. But I don’t want it to be serious either — far too many ‘serious’ law sites out there already. The fact that this stuff still isn’t well understood means the serious approach is dead in the water.

Collaborators and Traitors

Hopeless by Roy Lichtenstein, 1963

SOME actual, living, breathing lawyers have been shanghaied into collaborating (with me, that is) for this caper.

Either because they’re out of work, or the blog serves as their escape from reality of having to work with hormonally imbalanced Wall Street shemale corporate lawyers.

Notwithstanding that, the publisher and principal author is The Naked Listener. Everybody else is scared fartless to have their names associated with this caper.

But the collaborators (traitors all of them) do prevent me from going in over my head (and spin out of control for just about every post I write, as you all all of you well know).

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Disclaimer

No disclaimer needed. This is the Internet. Operate on some realistic level. Content is presented as-is with no representation expressed or implied for accuracy, factualness, timeliness or anything else for any purpose. Only a fool would rely on anything other than an actual practising lawyer. Thank you.

Now at: The Naked Listener's Weblog

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